Franchise Tax Board of California v. Gilbert P. Hyatt

I posted an article earlier on Gil Hyatt’s ongoing disputes with the USPTO. He also has ongoing disputes with the California Tax Board that reach back to his early licensing revenue from his 1990 microprocessor patent. The case is back before the Supreme Court for the third time. See Franchise Tax Board v. Hyatt (Hyatt I), 538 U.S. 488 (2003); Franchise Tax Board v. Hyatt (Hyatt II), 136 S.Ct. 1277 (2016).

The basic issue is that a Nevada jury found that California had used improper aggression in pursuing Hyatt for taxes that were not really owed. At trial, the jury awarded Hyatt $300 million in damages. The punitive damages were reduced however by the Supreme Court.

The question that the court will focus on again this year:

Whether Nevada v. Hall, 440 U.S. 410 (1979), which permits a sovereign State to be haled into another State’s courts without its consent, should be overruled.

In its 2016 decision, the Supreme Court was evenly divided on the same question.

The board has asked us to overrule Hall and hold that the Nevada courts lack jurisdiction to hear this lawsuit. The Court is equally divided on this question, and we consequently affirm the Nevada courts’ exercise of jurisdiction over California.

This time though, that tie is potentially already broken with the addition of Justice Gorsuch.

When he isn’t buying the Supreme Court so he can line his pockets and the pockets of his rich white daddy friends in the Repu k k ke party, he’s using his money to put irredeemably greedy big0t sk umb@gs like Dana Rohrabacher in Congress.

To answer my own question, it appears four justices bought into the cert. petition’s weak one-paragraph Agostini argument. Regardless of what the Supreme Court justices would like to do with Nevada v. Hall, those with any ideological consistency for the law of the case should dismiss the appeal as improvidently granted and wait for the next appropriate vehicle to judicially enact interstate sovereign immunity.

He was born yesterday. And he doesn’t like to talk about stuff that highlights his failings as a decent human being. Like the fact that he can’t see any important differences between the two major political parties in the US.

Well, “anon”, one party is filled with r@ cist pieces of shirt and is constantly blowing dog whistles to appeal to r@ cist voters who think that brown people are sub-human animals.

The other party is filled with people like me who aren’t afraid to expose the intellectual and moral failings of know-nothing glibertarian hypocrites like you.